‘Jurek is an embodiment of a quintessential youth … [His] only goals, before the disposing of auntie’s body becomes his prime preoccupation, are his walks around town. The book is full of passages of aimless heading out, of leaving the house, walking to this or that location, the places themselves don’t seem to matter. In these lingering passages, Bursa’s Jurek makes, or doesn’t make, decisions – to go to the fountain or the movies, or to get a drink, to talk to a girl. Until auntie’s death, he is ambivalent about things that are supposed to give life meaning: school, church. And although it’s that very ambivalence and blind groping for things to do, for goals, that is at the root of what could be the profile of cold killer, what’s interesting about Bursa’s book is that he is careful to refrain from moralizing.
    ‘Having come of age at a time when Soviet narratives of personal transformation by hard work, tractors and a grand finale set to the glow of orange-yellow sun with a girl hanging on the arm of a rising proletarian populated the bookstores, the challenge for Bursa was about showing the freedom to be young, and lost, like his narrator. For Bursa, who was no older than twenty-five at the time he wrote Killing Auntie, the work is as much about the author’s own youth as it is about wrestling with the body of the tired middle-aged caring but oppressive auntie of literature who dead or alive he cannot do with or without.
   ‘… Killing Auntie was published posthumously, when it was discovered among drafts Bursa left in his drawer. It was a breath of fresh air and a bold rebellion against traditions in Polish literature. Bursa’s translator, Powaga, writes in the introduction: “I first read Bursa when I was seventeen, a long-haired rebel in a school run according to the drab rules of ‘mature socialism’ in 1970s Poland, and immediately felt I had found a kindred spirit.”
     ‘The book is just as fresh now as it was then.’
     – Beatrice Smigasiewicz, Asymptote